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What Are The Implications For Our Kids When A Is For Aiden, Everywhere He Looks?

A quick search on the Pottery Barn Kids Web site reveals just how far we’ve come as consumers. We are living in age of abundance, and so finding the perfect baseball nightlight isn’t enough.

Now it is special because for no additional fee your child’s name will be printed just below the baseball stitching. There was no risk this nightlight would be lost at the playground. The custom name placement isn’t for any usefulness, instead it just makes the nightlight unique and thereby more desirable.

And if nightlights aren’t what you’re in the market for, no problem. Pottery Barn will put your kids names on just about anything they sell: plates, pillows, bed sheets, towels, step stools, backpacks, toy chests, canvas art, growth charts, chairs, bean bags, piggy banks, travel bags, even books will arrive within two weeks crafted to be uniquely for your little one, or at least his or her name.

Don’t get me wrong, these are often adorable things made even more so when you see the name you picked for your child embroidered or stamped across them. And Pottery Barn is doing what many other retailers are also doing: giving us what we want in customized products.

This a new, technology-enabled phenomenon that we are devouring. So what might it mean, psychologically and socially?

Old-school customization.

I can remember coveting a plastic California license plate key chain with my name printed on it, misspelled. I must have been 12, and this odd object was uniquely mine because it at a derivation of my name on it. Nothing else I owned had my name on it, unless I scribbled it on with a Sharpie pen.

Since then technology has made custom design wonderfully fast, cheap, and scalable. A startup in Silicon Valley spotted this earlier than most, back in 1999. Two brothers, with the help of their Dad launched Zazzle out of their garage. Their product line back then was limited to t-shirts because they’d developed a special ink process that was efficient enough they could do away with the minimum order requirements that were standard back then.

I wrote about Zazzle in 2006. The custom trend was still nascent back then. Now it is in everything we consume: ladies handbags, holiday cards, even our news has become custom. We read what our friends are telling us to read, or what we’ve chosen to follow one way or another.

Alain Morin, a psychologist at Mount Royal University, in Canada, who studies self-awareness see this sparking a broader societal shift. “People are much more self-aware than they used to be,” he says. For our kids, this could have a wide range of implications.

Take only one, Aiden.

Morain cites a study done in the late 1970s that tracked “transgression” as measured by kids taking more than one Halloween candy from a bowl after being instructed to take a single treat. The kids who followed the instructions most, and took just one candy, were in a group that cited their names (identity awareness) and saw a mirror propped behind the candy bowl (more self-awareness). The assumption, then, is that self-awareness makes us more likely to adhere to social norms.

Keying off this study, Morain suggests that custom labels combined with seeing our images so frequently (we snap photos of our kids eating bagels, after all) could lead to more rule-abiding behavior. That doesn’t sound awful. Then again, he cautions: “We know that the immediate effect of self-focus is also self-evaluation. You start to think about the ideal version of yourself. You engage in more self-criticism. That might make you want to change yourself or try to escape yourself, which later in life looks like drinking, drugs, over-exercising or eating.”

Morain isn’t actually suggesting that Pottery Barn toy chest for “Jack” will make Jack an alcoholic in twenty years. But rather that too many items custom to Jack combined with other influences that make him look inward could have negative implications.

Maureen Healy, author of “Growing Happy Kids” describes this in a slightly different way. “The more you focus on others, the happier you are. We risk sending a me, me, me message to kids. Of course kids should feel good about their names. But ultimately their self-esteem and confidence is going to come from lots of other sources,” says Healy.

Then there’s the question of whether kids even notice this stuff. Morain posits that if they do, they could become habituated to seeing their name on everything. And so unlike my once-coveted key chain, today’s super customized items have no more meaning than those without their names. Gabrielle Principe, Chair of the Department of Psychology at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania takes this further: “We might be doing this for our own benefit while our kids aren’t even aware it’s going on.”

Readers, I’m curious. What do you think mass customization risks, or doesn’t risk doing to our kids? Will they be more self-aware and thereby follow rules? Will they be overly self-centered? Or does this simply not matter compared to the other, perhaps greater ways we influence our kids?

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